Film is dead? What else is new?

AO Scott

A few weeks ago I travelled to a college on Long Island to give a lecture?in other words, to stand up in front of a room full of people, ramble for a few minutes about movies and movie criticism, and then spend the rest of the hour answering questions. It was the middle of the day, and the audience was composed, in what looked like roughly equal numbers, of undergraduates and older students enrolled in continuing education courses. Half of the people were 25 and under, the other half 65 and over, leaving me smack in the generational middle and, as it happened, bouncing vertiginously, from one question to the next, between the future and the past.

Will 3-D last? What will be the next global cinematic hot spot? What young stars will still be around 10 or 20 years from now? Hard questions to answer, since a critic?s job is not prophecy so much as the anticipation of surprise. But the other type of question was not surprising at all. Why aren?t there any good movies anymore?

It does no good to respond that, actually, there are. Providing evidence to back up that assertion?what about Margin Call? Moneyball? Mysteries of Lisbon??is equally fruitless, since the question is not really a question at all, but rather a general complaint. It is widely assumed, almost to the extent of being conventional wisdom, that movies have suffered an overall decline in quality and that the exceptions are outliers, holdovers or happy accidents. The past is full of glories, whether black-and-white jewels of the old studio system (Casablanca and All About Eve come up a lot), imported treasures from the 1960s (Antonioni! Godard!) or rough diamonds from the brief splendour of the New Hollywood in the ?70s. Whatever your preferred golden age, one thing is certain: They just don?t make them like they used to.

In strictly technical terms, this is true enough. The machinery of production and distribution is in the midst of an epochal change, part of the rapid and convulsive digitalisation of everything under the sun. If you go to a movie theatre, you are less and less likely to see a film in the traditional, literal sense. Cans and reels have been replaced by hard drives and digital files, and some of the old material hallmarks of cinema?the grainy swirl of emulsion as the light passes through the stock, the occasional shudder of sprockets sliding into place, the whirr and click of the projector ? are quickly taking on an aura of antiquity. Movies are shot and shown digitally and increasingly distributed that way as well, streaming onto the screen in your living room or in your hand.

These changes inspire enthusiasm, bewilderment and also a measure of mourning. In a recent review of Tower Heist and Melancholia?a pairing that might at once confirm and refute the gloom of backward-looking cinephiles ?Anthony Lane of The New Yorker laments the impending eclipse of moviegoing, a collective ritual ostensibly threatened by the ascendance of home viewing. ?Enjoy it while it lasts,? he concludes, offering a pre-emptive epitaph for a form of cultural consumption, built around ?compulsion? and ?communion,? with roots in ancient Athens and, apparently, no future to speak of.

Around the same time a headline on Roger Ebert?s blog announced The Sudden Death of Film. In the essay that follows, Ebert?s grief is tempered with resignation: ?The celluloid dream may live on in my hopes, but video commands the field,? he writes. Ebert, who has frequently (and eloquently) argued for the aesthetic superiority of film over video, acknowledges that ?my war is over, my side lost, and it?s important to consider this in the real world.? And he concludes with a wry elegy for the typewriter, a machine that has become, along with the movie projector and the turntable, a fetish and an emblem of superannuated modernity.

Ebert is generally immune to the golden-ageism that has become a critical default position; he embraces the old and the new with equal ardour.

The history of film is now more widely and readily accessible than ever before. We may lament the end of movie clubs and campus film societies that presented battered prints of great movies, but by any aesthetic standard, the high-quality, carefully restored digital transfers of classics and curiosities now available on DVD and Blu-ray offer a much better way to encounter the canon.

But the very proximity of this canon contributes to the devaluation of the present. Shouldn?t we be giving our attention to movies that have proved themselves, over the years, worthy of it?

By all means. The alternative is an uncritical embrace of the new for its own sake, a shallow contempt for tradition and a blindness to its beauties. But there is at least an equal risk of being blinded by those beauties to the energies that surround us, and to mistake affection for a standard of judgment. Of course no modern movie star can match Humphrey Bogart?s world-weary toughness or Bette Davis?s sparkling wit, and of course nothing in today?s movies looks or sound the way it used to. But why?or how?should it? Every art form changes, often at rates and in ways that cause discomfort to its devotees. But the arts also have a remarkable ability to withstand and absorb those changes, and to prove wrong the prophecies of their demise.

And yet movies, at the moment, feel especially fragile and perishable. That may be because film is so much younger than the other great art forms, which have had centuries to wane, wax, mutate and cross-pollinate. But there is also something about cinema?s essentially modern character that makes it vulnerable to fears of obsolescence. The camera has an uncanny ability to capture the world as it is, to seize events as they happen, and also to conjure visions of the future. But by the time the image reaches the eyes of the viewer, it belongs to the past, taking on the status of something retrieved. As for those bold projections of what is to come, they have a habit of looking quaint as soon as they arrive.

Nostalgia, in other words, is built into moviegoing, which is why moviegoing itself has been, almost from the beginning, the object of nostalgia. It hardly seems like an accident that so many movies embrace this bittersweet disposition. This week Martin Scorsese?s Hugo, which visits the earliest days of cinema, will open on the same day as The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius?s silent film about the silent era. Both films recapture some of the heady magic of the old days, and both make use of the latest technology in doing so.

Hugo, full of digital effects and viewable in 3-D, takes audiences back to the time of Georges M?li?s, the visionary filmmaker whose inventive sense of spectacle made him a special-effects pioneer at the turn of the 20th century. The Artist, a black-and-white, narrow-screen confection, tells the bittersweet tale of a screen idol whose career is threatened by the arrival of sound.

The birth of the talkies, it goes without saying, represents the first death of cinema, a tragedy that Hazanavicius has the sensitivity to acknowledge and the wit to mock. The movies survived sound, just as they survived television, the VCR and every other terminal diagnosis. And they will survive the current upheavals as well. How can I be sure? Because 10, 20, or 50 years from now someone will certainly be complaining that they don?t make them like they used to. Which is to say, like they do right now.